Sewage’s Cash Crop

Nov 1, 2009

Scientific American

HOW FLUSHING THE TOILET CAN LEAD TO PHOSPHORUS FOR FERTILIZERS

BY KATHERINE TWEED

Tucked away in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, three massive metal cones could help address the world’s dwindling supply of phosphorus, the crucial ingredient of fertilizers that has made modern agriculture possible. The cones make consistently highquality, slow-release fertilizer pellets from phosphorus recovered at the Durham Advance Wastewater Treatment Facility, less than 10 miles from downtown Portland. By generating about one ton of pellets every day, they are changing the view that such recycling could not be done efficiently. Ostara, the firm that makes the reactors and sells the pellets as Crystal Green, thinks that Durham is one of hundreds of facilities that could use the technology.

Humans excrete some 3.3 million tons of phosphorus annually. In fact, phosphorus from domestic sewage, in addition to fertilizer runoff, has traditionally been a nuisance, because it triggers blooms of algae that deplete local waters of oxygen. In some wastewater plants the element can also bind with ammonia and magnesium to form a mineral called struvite, which keeps phosphorus out of waterways but clogs pipes at the facilities. The growing recognition that cheap supplies of phosphorus will grow scarce in the coming decades has led some nations to consider conservation. Sweden has mandated that 60 percent of phosphate be recycled from wastewater by 2015. In 2008 China slapped a 135 percent export tariff on phosphate.

These pressures have made struvite a hot topic in sewage circles. Japan has been recycling struvite for a decade, but the costeffectiveness and quality of the pellets varied, according to Don Mavinic, professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia (U.B.C.) and co-inventor of Ostara’s technology. “There’s always been a problem of struvite removal,” Mavinic says. “I wanted to build a better mousetrap.”